Diaspora: “The past few weeks have been pretty crazy for us here at Diaspora*. It is unbelievably painful to lose such a close friend and collaborator as Ilya, and we want to thank our countless community members, friends, family, and professional contacts for all of your support as we try to take care of ourselves and plot a course for Diaspora*’s future. We are forever grateful to the amazing community of people who have stepped up to help us get things back in order. – Of course, the next logical question is, ‘where do we go from here?‘ After long discussions with each other, people close to us, and members of the Diaspora* community, we have come up with a plan to get our beta out the door by early 2012. … Currently Diaspora* Inc. consists of Daniel and Maxwell as full-time team members, plus Raphael and our former NYU advisor Evan Korth on our board. We are incorporated as a for-profit C corporation, and we are a mission-driven company first and foremost… Over the coming months, team expansion is one of our top priorities. We are currently looking for interns, and will be hiring full time developers and a community manager next. Interested in working with us? Check out our internship postings… We are working on ways to generate additional funds to give us the bandwidth to hire more developers, further engage the community, and match the rapid development of closed networks. We will keep the community posted as this process evolves. – We can assure you that any funding solution we go for will never betray the trust you have placed with us, and our ongoing vision of privacy, openness, and ownership of your data. This vision is why we started building Diaspora*, and it is still our number one commitment. … Diaspora*’s mission as a company is to build tools to help people get control of their data and do fun things with it online. It’s about giving users ownership and control over what they share, and creating amazing things. … This was our vision when we launched our Kickstarter campaign in April 2010, and it remains our vision today.“

Dennis Collective: “Not officially beta yet, alpha logo coming back soon, but I’m glad you noticed the speedup, we’ve been working on that for weeks.”

Dennis Collective: “TL;DR Stream re-written, now 3x faster, some features not here yet. Diaspora* is still in alpha, so it’s better to ship this faster (sexier) version sooner rather than later. – Dan Hansen, Daniel Grippi, and I have been working for the last month re-architecting the front-end to do a lot of rendering client side using backbone.js. – This has made the stream 3x faster. – We’ll write a more comprehensive blog article tomorrow, but in brief: We are not at 100% feature parity with the current version yet. We’re working on it. This new version is way faster, which should hopefully be more enjoyable. Users are sure to encounter a bunch of (hopefully small) bugs, but we figured that the benefit of having a stream that goes three times faster, outweighs all the negatives. – Thanks!“

Diaspora: “Diaspora is Growing and Changing Fast! – Diaspora continues to grow in popularity, this is awesome! Keeping up with this increasing demand on our servers is fun and challenging… Working towards these efforts, Dan Hansen, Dennis Collinson, and Daniel Grippi have spent the last month working on moving the stream over to a more modern architecture. You may have noticed some minor differences in Diaspora today, these are symptoms of a major re-write that’s going on under her surface. Yesterday, we decided that this new version, which uses Backbone.js to render the stream is mature enough to push out to all of you Fabulous Alpha Users. … We will be trimming down and streamlining Diaspora’s code-base in the near-term. This goes in line with our goals of making Diaspora easier to develop, and more performant. If you’re a developer who fancies making code beautiful, we’d love to have you on board!“

I had been following your comments inside Diaspora. Now I have some problems logged in being user of https://social.mathaba.net.
It is exactly since these days you are writing here about 8. January 2012 “seems to be on the #Beta … Some minor features are missing. ..” – But I have really problems there and not only missing some features. If I am allowing Java Script for this site now like before then it is running automatically to “https://social.mathaba.net/stream#stream”, nearly not important what I had wanted to be connected to!
Of course you could answer me into German also because it is my mother tongue.
And of course I am very interested to get Beta soon and I would like to host it also and being active for advertisement to spread it like I had been written in a comment of your messages once.
Best wishes, Steffen

Thanks Gerrit. I have written now about this problem in blocking Java script because problem is still same like nearly one week ago. It is already if people want sign up it is impossible without blocking Java script to see this window long enough because it is automatically running back also. So I cannot read anything inside “Diaspora Mathaba” now. That’s why I had written there in tag “#bug” that they should use your site here to answer because I cannot read anything there. But because I had to block Java script to make this window usable for writing text and click to send it, because of this I am worrying that it had been send really. Because I cannot ready anything there I cannot write there to Silvia Morgenstern also. Let’s hope and wait for better Diaspora we need very much. Best wishes, Steffen

ATD: “Social network co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy has died. Zhitomirskiy, along with Maxwell Salzberg, Daniel Grippi, and Raphael Sofaer were preparing to launch Diaspora, a social networking site designed to be open and decentralized. He was 22.”

TC: “Late last night, word began to spread around the tech community that one of Diaspora’s four co-founders, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, had passed away. With much sadness, we’ve now confirmed this terrible news with the Diaspora team. … Our sincerest condolences to Ilya’s family, friends, and the entire Diaspora team.”

HuffPo: “Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the young co-founders behind social network Diaspora*, passed away suddenly on Saturday, TechCrunch has confirmed. – No details about Zhitomirskiy’s cause of death had been issued at the time of this writing. He was 22 years old.”

Mashable: “Ilya Zhitomirskiy, the co-founder of the open-source Facebook alternative Diaspora, has died at the age of 22. The cause of death is not yet publicly known. – Zhitomirskiy, along with Dan Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg and Raphael Sofaer, created the open-source software as part of a project while they were students at New York University.”

ZDNet: Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the co-founders of social network Diaspora, has died at age 22, TechCrunch reported today. The cause and date of his death were not reported.”

CNET: “Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of co-founders of the social network Diaspora, has died at age 22,TechCrunch reported today.”

TTO: “Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy has passed away at the age of 22.”

TCMG: “Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 22, was one of four students at New York University’s Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences to design Diaspora, a platform which differentiates itself from the highly centralised Facebook, by leaving ownership of whatever is posted with the users who posted it, and allowing users to host their own content.”

WPN: “If you’re unfamiliar with Zhitomirskiy, he was one of the four co-founders of Diaspora, a free personal web server that implements a distributed social networking service. It’s been rumored that Diaspora could eventually become a direct competitor to Facebook. – The death of Zhitomirskiy is pretty hard to grasp, he was only 22. The exact cause of his death is unknown at this time.”

TCMG: “Zhitomirskiy’s last post on Diaspora on November 7 has become a tribute, with other Diaspora members posting their thoughts and condolences. – The tragedy of someone passing at such a young age is mitigated slightly by his achievements and legacy in bringing Diaspora into being. He will be remembered by many.”

GigaOM: ” I am speechless. I met Ilya on a couple of occasions and am having a tough time coming to grips with the news. Our hearts and prayers go to his family, friends and the Diaspora community.”

Examiner: “Regardless of the cause of death, it is unfortunate to lose a bright young star in the community of individuals working to make the web, and the way we use it, a better place. Condolences go out to Ilya’s family, friends, and the entire Diaspora team.”

TD: “The network was due to launch this month, although it is not known whether this will still go ahead.”

TC: “Following Founder’s Passing, Diaspora Opens Redesigned Alpha To Invitees – Diaspora sent out a new round of invites to a redesigned alpha version of its open source social network today. The invites came just before the saddening news broke that 22 year old founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy had recently passed away. … Diaspora has now covered the bases to become a satisfactory solution for those uncomfortable with the compromises of control required for joining the leading social networks. Even if it doesn’t grow to hundreds of millions of users, Diaspora’s working alternative could influence the conversation about what a social network should be. This could inspire Facebook and Google+ to adopt some of Diaspora’s flexibility and expand the impact of Ilya’s ideals.“

Goodby Ilya. Thank you for all you have done. Diaspora has kicked off its training wheels and is ready to roll on forward thanks to the work of you, the rest of the D* team, and this wonderful community of Diaspora. <3

FT: “Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the co-founders of social network Diaspora, has died at the age of 22, TechCrunch reports.”

MB: “Diaspora co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy has died at the age of 22. The cause of death is, as of yet, unknown.”

DM: “Social networking pioneer found dead at age of 22 – Friends and fans of Zhitomirskiy have written tributes on Twitter after hearing of his death, with one posting: ‘So sad! Social networking pioneer dies at 22.'”

SR: “Just as a new batch of invites to the much-anticipated open source social networking platform Diaspora were issued, the sad news emerged that one of the platform’s co-founder’s, Ilya Zhitomirskiy, has died. He was only 22.”

Register: “Open-source social network Diaspora has launched a redesigned alpha version of its software, with invites going out to users of the site hours before it was confirmed that co-founder Ilya Zhitomirskiy, 22, had died.”

DJ: “Very sad the world has lost an innovative thinker, and Zhitomirskiy’s vision will be carried forward.”

Diaspora: “We are happy to announce that DiasporaFoundation.org is now live. DiasporaFoundation.org will be the home of the Diaspora* project, a place where our community can share information, learn about cool new features, and information about where they can get an account. – This new blog replaces blog.joindiaspora.com (WordPress FTW), and will be updated with news from the community and announcements from the core team.”

Diaspora: “Social freedom. – Ever wanted to to share something with just a certain group of people? Diaspora* pioneered Aspects, the original system for sharing things with just the people you want. Of course, you can still tell the whole world too, if you want to. – Diaspora* lets you stay connected with your friends, even if they’re not on Diaspora* yet. Simply connect your account to other major services, then use Diaspora* as your home base to post to your profiles on these other services too. Diaspora* currently supports cross-posting to your Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts, with more to come soon. … Own your data – Now you don’t have to settle for having your data on someone else’s server. Since Diaspora is completely free software, you can grab the code and host it wherever you want. We’re constantly making it easier for individuals to host their own pods on Diaspora*. – Coming soon: Download all of your data in standard formats that can be used in other places. – Get started on a community pod and then move all of your social data to a pod you control. Diaspora*’s distributed design means that you will never have to sacrifice control of your data to stay connected.”

Diaspora: “Join the movement. – The future of the social web starts with you. – Diaspora* is already in the top 2% of all open source projects ever. The codebase has received over 800 forks, over 5000 followers on GitHub, and over 300 Grassroots Volunteers… Open source is about individuality, transparency, creativity, and destiny. It is about having an idea, and making it reality. Diaspora* was founded to fulfill a passion for fun, and for making the Internet a better place. Open source is what enables us to change the world, for ourselves, and let our friends across the web benefit from our exploration. … We all make Diaspora*. We might not know you just yet, but we think you’d be a great fit for building the future of the web. You’re fantastic, and you’re ready to change the world. Contributing to Diaspora* comes in all different shapes and sizes. Whether you’re a user helping us find bugs, providing feedback on our mailing lists, or contributing code or design, we need you.”

Diaspora: “Roadmap – These are things that are in our plan, but haven’t yet come to the front of the priority queue. If you’re looking for a feature to implement, and any of these strike your fancy, come talk to us in IRC first. We may have thoughts about how we want these implemented, and we can help you get started…

Data portability: allow people to Oauth to a new seed and move their entire account to the new seed, and then notify all of their contacts of the change, so people can move around seamlessly.

Twitter-style API for posting and searching public posts.

Services integration: attach services to particular aspects.

Server to server authentication: Right now Diaspora is push-only. We need servers to authenticate with each other to pull data in.

Refining aspects – having people only in the public group, a Twitter-style follow model, etc.

More standards compliance: for instance, we have a salmon implementation, but it’s not tested against the spec yet. It should be made compliant with the salmon spec.

Events

Photo tagging

Mentions and tags should work in comments and captions.

Software Update Framework for folks running their own pod.

An administrator interface that would do the entire update automatically, like the way WordPress can be updated through its admin interface.”

Diaspora: “We’re building the future we want to see – a new social web that keeps you in control of your data, giving you the freedom to do what you want and have fun. We’re a tiny core team of developers working our tails off, and we’re also a huge community effort, with more than 150 people having contributed code to our open-source software, hundreds of others engaged in community organizing and spreading the word, and thousands of people providing feedback and financial support. We can’t do this without you. Please give what you can. Thank you.“

Diasporial: “[September 15th] is a very special day for the Diaspora project. It has been exactly one year since the guys released the Diaspora source code! For a year now, people have been able to contribute to this project and set up pods. And so they did! Till date, 7371 commits have been made by the contributors and the four founders. In only a years time, the amount of Diaspora users has grown from 4 to over 100.000, spread over lots of pods! … It is rumoured that Diaspora will hit beta in November, on its Alpha release anniversary.”

Diaspora: “We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made. … Our developer community is growing. Diaspora has had over 100 unique code contributors and countless others have edited our wiki and updated Diaspora’s translations in over 51 languages. We have over 4,600 followers and over 840 forks, which means that tons of developers are checking out our code. That makes us the sixth most popular project on GitHub, right behind great open source projects like JQuery, Ruby On Rails, and Node, just to name a few.”

Diaspora: “There’s been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can’t help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We’re proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and tens of thousands of community members, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who’ve lined up to try Diaspora* – that is, by all of us who’ve stood up to say ‘there has to be a better way.’ We’re making a difference already.”

RWW: “There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it’s decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered. … Diaspora has been called the anti-Facebook for its strong privacy stance, and it had ‘aspects’ before anyone knew about Google Plus and its circles. … If Google Plus has taught us anything, it’s that normal people don’t feel like leaving the social networks where they already feel settled. … Is there anything Diaspora can do? I think so, but it’s a departure from it’s current incarnation, which is an awful lot like Google Plus (or vice versa, or whatever). It’s unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from one social network that works to another of which no one has ever heard. Diaspora’s potential is in its ability to syndicate to our other services (currently Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) while still allowing us to own our data. … If Diaspora is built as a publishing platform that lets us own our content and direct it to our existing networks – and especially if we can read from them, too – it would be an awesome, welcome tool that even Dave Winer could love. But if the launch of Google Plus wasn’t splashy enough to start a mass Facebook exodus, a later launch of a service that looks the same is not going to do it.”

TNW: “Diaspora has never pitched itself as direct competitor to the likes of Facebook – more an alternative model for how social networks could be designed. However, it’s gained a reputation from observers as ‘that quirky Facebook alternative that never quite made it.’ Whether there’s a need or desire for its product or not, it seems there’s life in the Diaspora team yet.”

Mullenberg: “WP.com is different from every other social platform out there because in addition to giving you ownership of your data you get ownership of the code running your data as well, you could run the same Open source software yourself, and in fact we’ll even help you do it. – Open Source is like a Bill of Rights for software that protects your essential freedoms. When you bring a friend to WordPress you can do it without worry because we’re building something to be around ten, twenty, thirty years from now.”

Mullenberg: “This has been an exciting year for WordPress. We’ve grown to power 14.7% of the top million websites in the world, up from 8.5%, and the latest data show 22 out of every 100 new active domains in the US are running WordPress. – We also conducted our first ever user and developer survey, which got over 18,000 responses from all over the world: We found a few interesting tidbits from the survey responses already, including that 6,800 self-employed respondents were responsible for over 170,000 sites personally, and charged a median hourly rate of $50. In tough economic times, it’s heartening to see Open Source creating so many jobs. – We know there’s more good stuff hidden in there and we’re open sourcing and releasing the raw information behind it. If you’re a researcher and would like to dig into the anonymized survey data yourself, you can grab it here. (Careful, it’s a 9MB CSV.)“

VB: “One year ago, WordPress was used by 8.5 percent of the world’s top million sites, so it’s astounding how many domains are using it now. In July, WordPress-based sites passed the 50 million marker. And many of the most prominent blogs around the web, including VentureBeat, are also using the platform. … Mullenwag gave some examples of sites he thinks exemplify the future of WordPress and show off what it can do, including Jay Z’s Life + Times lifestyle magazine, art project Clouds 365, and awesomely designed time-waster Who Would Win a Fight. – Mullenwag also sees developers using WordPress more often as a platform for web applications. ‘Because it’s open-source, there isn’t an exact end point for what developers can do with it,’ Mullenwag said. ‘A lot of big businesses and startups are interested in using it.’”

TNW: “The popularity of microblogging platforms such as Twitter and Tumblr has led many to wonder if the long-form blogging medium is on the decline. However, while microblogging as an activity may appeal to a distinct user base, WordPress is a robust, customizable publishing platform that powers the websites of many top media brands, including The Next Web.”

RWW: “Mullenweg’s address at the WordCamp conference in San Francisco this week goes through the history of the WordPress user interface, showing how its features developed over time and were then pared down to today’s minimal, efficient design. With its frequent adjustments to UI and its healthy market for ready-made and custom themes and plug-ins, WordPress’ user friendliness is key to its broad and rapid adoption by content creators.“